Fosse's Melancholy got to me, under my skin, through my skin. So glad I found correct information about the hospital, Eugenia Memorial. Further looking today got old photos and more amazing information---the building was designed by Horace Trumbauer's firm! Just like Ronale Manor and Lynnwood Hall. This from the images on facebook
Pre-Demolition Briar Hill/Eugenia Hospital
Design by Horace Trumbauer, photos taken & contributed by Deb Wilson
Horace Trumbauer built Briar Hill Mansion for William McIntyre Elkins, the grandson of traction magnate William Lukens Elkins. The estate was built between 1929 and 1930 in Whitemarsh Valley, Pennsylvania, and Elkins was a notable book collector and part of the extended Elkins-Widener family that commissioned many houses from Trumbauer.
I remember the rotunda the entrance, black marble floor as I recall. Beautiful curving stairway up to the second floor. Security grills on all the windows. Ugly green paint on walls and windows. Every inch covered by heavy brown film of years of tobacco smoke hazing up the whole interior. Brother Thomas had been taken there a day or two before I was and there were guesses and rumors about electric shock therapy. I had a sense that the shock therapy section was in one wing and I was housed in the dormitory in the other wing and I kept fearing I would be moved. Nothing to do but take the meds every day, sit in the common area, eat meals. Daily or every so often we were given materials to make woven potholders, keep our fingers busy, pass the time. Must have met with a doctor in the white coats every so often but no specific memories of that.
Memoir of a pre-twink Catholic, or how I lost a vocation and found an otter's life. Thing is Fosse's imagined portrait of Hertervig has none of that flip, sarcastic edge to it. Did he work from a biography? Must have. By the time he wrote it Hertervig quite a national Norwegian hero. wiki Fosse was born in 1959 in Haugesund, Norway, and grew up in Strandebarm.[10] His family were Quakers and Pietists, which he credits with shaping his spiritual views.[11] A serious accident at age seven brought him close to death; Fosse saw a shimmering light and experienced peace and beauty: "I think this experience fundamentally changed me," Fosse recalled, "and perhaps made me a writer.[12][13] He started writing around the age of twelve. As a teenager, Fosse was interested in becoming a rock guitarist, and he began to dedicate more time to writing once he gave up his musical ambitions.[11] He also played the fiddle, and much of his teenage writing practice involved creating his own lyrics for musical pieces. Growing up, he was influenced by communism and anarchism and has described himself as a "hippie"
45 years younger. Did he commit any mortal or venial sins when he was in early adolescence. We learned to confess impure thoughts and impure acts. Guess what the chief act of impurity was considered to be? Lars explores it at length. The doctors assure him it causes his craziness and insures he will never be able to paint again.
Sin, guilt, shame, death, masses for the dead every morning before classes at St Marys. Catafaulk and large black candle sticks and lighted candles, organ and voice from the choir loft singing the latin mass for the dead, the priest in that ugly black chasuble for daily use, stiff black brocade with no drape or flow whatsoever. Sex as something wholly cloaked in secrecy and shame. Ok, later in high school we had one class with the science teacher ready to answer any questions anyone could put forth about sexuality. Did anyone ask if masturbation was still a venial sin or even a mortal sin under certain conditions? Did you still need to go to confession every week, as mother nagged so often, so as to be in the worthy state of grace to go to communion on sunday morning?
All of this tangled and retangled over the years from, I guess, 7th grade onward, or even 6th? with dad's intervention to ask his doctor to look me over and assure him I was not going to be queer.
A lifetime of pondering these things, letting them tangle and untangle and retangle. Fosse is quite good at using simple language and endless repetition to portray this. If you stay with it, both writing it and then reading it, surely it replicates or imitates meditative practices of all sorts. Hindu mantras, chiefly. Obsessive ritual as so essential to religious experiences worldwide. Georges Bataille which did it take so long to find your work? And those of all who like you helped everyone break away from two and more centuries of scientific idiocies beyond question. The imperial mind, the dominance of twisted rationality. As obsessive and endless as all such other experiences. Art as the endless struggle to counter and reinvent. Handke plays his role too. Bit of a shock when he says so casually "I awoke from my nightmares with an erection, penetrated the sleeping Claire, went limp, and fell asleep again." 87 Short Letter 1972 Would he have published such a line twenty years later? Sure, guess so. Everything cycles and swirls no matter what regulations we attempt over the years.
Does it do any good to rehash these things mentally or in print? When I visited Elkins Park on my own many years later I entered the property from the back street where you could walk into the pond at the bottom of the hill on which the house was located. Ronale Manor, Anselm Hall. The brother who was the superior when we were there was seated by the pond. I had been to the college campus earlier and learned that it was a day celebrating his fifty years in the order. I saw him sitting there alone, weeping, crying. His silver hair. Recognized his whole look. Brother Didymus John. Such a strange first name, one I had never heard of, always remembered. He played tennis with Kevin Douglas, John Cummins, who had gone to Anselm Hall directly from a year or two first at the merchant marine academy, he was from Pittsburgh. Did he skip the year at Ammendale? Don't remember that. Why did I not go further into the property, walk around the pond, and greet Brother John, remind him of who I was and wish him congratulations on is anniversary? He after all had met with me before I departed in the spring of 1967--in mid-or late mid semester. Sent home. He had talked with me briefly and gave approval for canceling the temporary vows and releasing me from all obligations to the order etc etc. I recall none of that language or detail, only in hindsight filled it in. The one thing I remember him saying clearly was Go back home and start dating girls again. Or start dating. How much had Kevin ever told him about me, if anything? Had Kevin told the house director, another brother john, more bald but gray, anything about me? Surely he must have told him that one day that spring or the spring before when he Kevin was mowing the grass near the house I had been up on the highest floor, the fourth? in the room remodeled into a study hall with rows of oak desks made by the brother carpenters and had climbed up onto the inner edge of the largest windows (tudor style leaded glass and iron framing) the window sill and put my legs out over the will and window frame and sat there and looked down at Kevin below until he noticed me and then did I wave to him or just know that he recognized me. He walked behind a tree so I could not see him anymore. At some point I chuckled finally to myself and said I had better go back into the room because if something happened next God himself would not have known if I had jumped or fallen. The idea that no one would know, even myself, especially myself I guess, made me laugh a bit to myself and the laughter broke the mood, the anxiety, the cloud of fear and shame? and I got back inside. Between the two visits to Eugenia, one in November, the second in March, I was on the meds prescribed by the psychiatrist. I drove out to see him at his office, not too far from Elkins Park, once a week for a while. He smoked and signaled that the hour was up by putting out a cigarette and dumping the ashes accumulated in the heavy green ceramic ashtray with a round seal on it that sat in front of me, between us, marking a boundary no doubt, into a tissue and throwing them away. I think I stayed on the meds after I got home and through that summer until I started classes at College Park. Or maybe even longer. Upper and downer I called them, was told to call them, they felt like that, like a ceiling over and a floor under, keeping me from feeling like my normal self.
Just back from the post office, mailing the worry bear to PT. Street workers blocking the intersection of Highland and the street the library is on. Big snow from yesterday all cleared, cy residues, sun melting some more. Call from Mid-State, Va has no u t i.
Day off not a day off as usual, but quiet. Gray again after some sun. Will we go to walmart today or not? now almost noon.
Handke reports the strange event when Judith sent him a box wrapped in a wire attached to a battery inside so when I tried to open it further, take off the wire, he got a mild shock. "The grass around me grew very bright, then darkened; again lizards were darting about in the corners of my eyes, the objects around me twined themselves into hieroglyphics, I ducked to avoid an insect but it was only a motorcycle droning in the distance." 122 Amazing sentence and whole passage. He could be a bit crazy too. Reminds me that during the night I came up with the term "glyphgar" to describe the skills I developed over the years to deal with the events that mattered to me. In spite of all the other things surrounding them.
Headache still. took a sip of mild zyrtec. now advil? or dark chocolate? what relieves it, what causes it, is it just needing more water?
4:24 pm Finished Handke's Short Letter, Long Farewell Final scene visit with John Ford after passsing through Tucson, windy, then up to Oregon to see his brother take a shit in the bushes of the logging operation, then to California to hang with Ford and tell their story. Judith and the narrator, ready finally to part in peace. What a strange tavelogue novel. Would have been great for the travel course. What to make of it? It is brilliant, keen observations on America versus Europe. Funny. Detailed in millions of crisp, unusual ways. So unusual difficult to capture, take in, break free from. Haunting. The torments and empty stretches the narrator goes through take us by surprise and reveal secrets not told. Wonderful.
Horace Trumbauer built Briar Hill Mansion for William McIntyre Elkins, the grandson of traction magnate William Lukens Elkins. The estate was built between 1929 and 1930 in Whitemarsh Valley, Pennsylvania, and Elkins was a notable book collector and part of the extended Elkins-Widener family that commissioned many houses from Trumbauer.
I remember the rotunda the entrance, black marble floor as I recall. Beautiful curving stairway up to the second floor. Security grills on all the windows. Ugly green paint on walls and windows. Every inch covered by heavy brown film of years of tobacco smoke hazing up the whole interior. Brother Thomas had been taken there a day or two before I was and there were guesses and rumors about electric shock therapy. I had a sense that the shock therapy section was in one wing and I was housed in the dormitory in the other wing and I kept fearing I would be moved. Nothing to do but take the meds every day, sit in the common area, eat meals. Daily or every so often we were given materials to make woven potholders, keep our fingers busy, pass the time. Must have met with a doctor in the white coats every so often but no specific memories of that.
Memoir of a pre-twink Catholic, or how I lost a vocation and found an otter's life. Thing is Fosse's imagined portrait of Hertervig has none of that flip, sarcastic edge to it. Did he work from a biography? Must have. By the time he wrote it Hertervig quite a national Norwegian hero. wiki Fosse was born in 1959 in Haugesund, Norway, and grew up in Strandebarm.[10] His family were Quakers and Pietists, which he credits with shaping his spiritual views.[11] A serious accident at age seven brought him close to death; Fosse saw a shimmering light and experienced peace and beauty: "I think this experience fundamentally changed me," Fosse recalled, "and perhaps made me a writer.[12][13] He started writing around the age of twelve. As a teenager, Fosse was interested in becoming a rock guitarist, and he began to dedicate more time to writing once he gave up his musical ambitions.[11] He also played the fiddle, and much of his teenage writing practice involved creating his own lyrics for musical pieces. Growing up, he was influenced by communism and anarchism and has described himself as a "hippie"
45 years younger. Did he commit any mortal or venial sins when he was in early adolescence. We learned to confess impure thoughts and impure acts. Guess what the chief act of impurity was considered to be? Lars explores it at length. The doctors assure him it causes his craziness and insures he will never be able to paint again.
Masturbation was considered a cause of mental illness for
about two centuries, from the mid-18th century until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when medical and psychological views began to shift. This belief was fueled by the 1758 publication of a Swiss physician's influential treatise linking the practice to various ailments. The association with insanity was perpetuated throughout the 19th century, but by the early 20th century, the idea was increasingly rejected as a "medical superstition" But of course that news did not penetrate Maryland or Pennsylvania until the late 1960s. Increasingly rejected but slowly and reluctantly. So the way Lars feels himself treated resonated as the ways I felt considered in life deep inside the church I tried to embrace to its roots, i e by having a true vocation, being called to enter into the depths of the mysteries as to why God wanted me to be called and live the pure and perfect life of the religious life as the surest path to sainthood. Just like Thomas Merton's great book the seven story mountain which put its blessing and romanticism for all of this over the whole of American culture for that period. One of Kennedy's staffers came to speak to our high school class (all the way out to benighted western maryland but before that I had read Seven Storey and the novels A Separate Peace and the one by James Agee. Sin, guilt, shame, death, masses for the dead every morning before classes at St Marys. Catafaulk and large black candle sticks and lighted candles, organ and voice from the choir loft singing the latin mass for the dead, the priest in that ugly black chasuble for daily use, stiff black brocade with no drape or flow whatsoever. Sex as something wholly cloaked in secrecy and shame. Ok, later in high school we had one class with the science teacher ready to answer any questions anyone could put forth about sexuality. Did anyone ask if masturbation was still a venial sin or even a mortal sin under certain conditions? Did you still need to go to confession every week, as mother nagged so often, so as to be in the worthy state of grace to go to communion on sunday morning?
All of this tangled and retangled over the years from, I guess, 7th grade onward, or even 6th? with dad's intervention to ask his doctor to look me over and assure him I was not going to be queer.
A lifetime of pondering these things, letting them tangle and untangle and retangle. Fosse is quite good at using simple language and endless repetition to portray this. If you stay with it, both writing it and then reading it, surely it replicates or imitates meditative practices of all sorts. Hindu mantras, chiefly. Obsessive ritual as so essential to religious experiences worldwide. Georges Bataille which did it take so long to find your work? And those of all who like you helped everyone break away from two and more centuries of scientific idiocies beyond question. The imperial mind, the dominance of twisted rationality. As obsessive and endless as all such other experiences. Art as the endless struggle to counter and reinvent. Handke plays his role too. Bit of a shock when he says so casually "I awoke from my nightmares with an erection, penetrated the sleeping Claire, went limp, and fell asleep again." 87 Short Letter 1972 Would he have published such a line twenty years later? Sure, guess so. Everything cycles and swirls no matter what regulations we attempt over the years.
Does it do any good to rehash these things mentally or in print? When I visited Elkins Park on my own many years later I entered the property from the back street where you could walk into the pond at the bottom of the hill on which the house was located. Ronale Manor, Anselm Hall. The brother who was the superior when we were there was seated by the pond. I had been to the college campus earlier and learned that it was a day celebrating his fifty years in the order. I saw him sitting there alone, weeping, crying. His silver hair. Recognized his whole look. Brother Didymus John. Such a strange first name, one I had never heard of, always remembered. He played tennis with Kevin Douglas, John Cummins, who had gone to Anselm Hall directly from a year or two first at the merchant marine academy, he was from Pittsburgh. Did he skip the year at Ammendale? Don't remember that. Why did I not go further into the property, walk around the pond, and greet Brother John, remind him of who I was and wish him congratulations on is anniversary? He after all had met with me before I departed in the spring of 1967--in mid-or late mid semester. Sent home. He had talked with me briefly and gave approval for canceling the temporary vows and releasing me from all obligations to the order etc etc. I recall none of that language or detail, only in hindsight filled it in. The one thing I remember him saying clearly was Go back home and start dating girls again. Or start dating. How much had Kevin ever told him about me, if anything? Had Kevin told the house director, another brother john, more bald but gray, anything about me? Surely he must have told him that one day that spring or the spring before when he Kevin was mowing the grass near the house I had been up on the highest floor, the fourth? in the room remodeled into a study hall with rows of oak desks made by the brother carpenters and had climbed up onto the inner edge of the largest windows (tudor style leaded glass and iron framing) the window sill and put my legs out over the will and window frame and sat there and looked down at Kevin below until he noticed me and then did I wave to him or just know that he recognized me. He walked behind a tree so I could not see him anymore. At some point I chuckled finally to myself and said I had better go back into the room because if something happened next God himself would not have known if I had jumped or fallen. The idea that no one would know, even myself, especially myself I guess, made me laugh a bit to myself and the laughter broke the mood, the anxiety, the cloud of fear and shame? and I got back inside. Between the two visits to Eugenia, one in November, the second in March, I was on the meds prescribed by the psychiatrist. I drove out to see him at his office, not too far from Elkins Park, once a week for a while. He smoked and signaled that the hour was up by putting out a cigarette and dumping the ashes accumulated in the heavy green ceramic ashtray with a round seal on it that sat in front of me, between us, marking a boundary no doubt, into a tissue and throwing them away. I think I stayed on the meds after I got home and through that summer until I started classes at College Park. Or maybe even longer. Upper and downer I called them, was told to call them, they felt like that, like a ceiling over and a floor under, keeping me from feeling like my normal self.
Just back from the post office, mailing the worry bear to PT. Street workers blocking the intersection of Highland and the street the library is on. Big snow from yesterday all cleared, cy residues, sun melting some more. Call from Mid-State, Va has no u t i.
Day off not a day off as usual, but quiet. Gray again after some sun. Will we go to walmart today or not? now almost noon.
Handke reports the strange event when Judith sent him a box wrapped in a wire attached to a battery inside so when I tried to open it further, take off the wire, he got a mild shock. "The grass around me grew very bright, then darkened; again lizards were darting about in the corners of my eyes, the objects around me twined themselves into hieroglyphics, I ducked to avoid an insect but it was only a motorcycle droning in the distance." 122 Amazing sentence and whole passage. He could be a bit crazy too. Reminds me that during the night I came up with the term "glyphgar" to describe the skills I developed over the years to deal with the events that mattered to me. In spite of all the other things surrounding them.
Headache still. took a sip of mild zyrtec. now advil? or dark chocolate? what relieves it, what causes it, is it just needing more water?
4:24 pm Finished Handke's Short Letter, Long Farewell Final scene visit with John Ford after passsing through Tucson, windy, then up to Oregon to see his brother take a shit in the bushes of the logging operation, then to California to hang with Ford and tell their story. Judith and the narrator, ready finally to part in peace. What a strange tavelogue novel. Would have been great for the travel course. What to make of it? It is brilliant, keen observations on America versus Europe. Funny. Detailed in millions of crisp, unusual ways. So unusual difficult to capture, take in, break free from. Haunting. The torments and empty stretches the narrator goes through take us by surprise and reveal secrets not told. Wonderful.
